In recent years, there has been growing interest by various engineering product companies to perform design simulation studies at different stages of product development to compete in the market. This has consistently resulted in increased requirement of skilled CFD resources and proving to be a very good career opportunity for engineers aspiring to make a career in the interesting domain of heat transfer and fluid flows. However there seems to be a widespread confusion in the student community as to what skills are desired by these industries for a fresher to qualify.

Having already gone through our blog series of CFD modeling of turbomachinery, wherein we discussed about the CAD Repair and Grid Generation we shall now explore the different solver models available in a commercial software package. CFD modeling of flows within systems containing moving components (e.g. turbomachines) are performed by resorting to moving reference frames (MRF). There are a number of both generalized and specialized commercial softwares available that apply moving reference frames for both translating and rotating systems. MRF approach finds application in a wide range of systems like turbomachinery, mixing equipment, electric motors and generators, rotating passages & land and air vehicle motions. In the current blog we shall try to understand applying MRF model for turbomachinery explained with the help of a simple test case.

Though CFD has been widely used as a standard and well established engineering design analysis and optimization tool, the turbomachinery flow simulation still remains one of the challenges to handle. The typical reasons that make them so are the very complex nature of geometries and flow physics encountered in turbomachines. The following phenomena make turbomachinery flows extremely intricate and difficult to model for CFD simulation studies:

As the performance of a catalytic converter is substantially affected by the flow distribution inside the substrate, a uniform flow distribution can increase its efficiency, lower the pressure drop and optimize engine performance. The flow distribution in a catalytic converter assembly is governed by the geometry configurations of inlet and outlet cone section, the substrate and exhaust gas compositions and therefore a better design of the catalytic converter is very important. In this blog we shall have insights of CFD modeling approach of flow inside a catalytic converter with the help a flow visualization.

In the earlier blog Combustion in Internal Combustion (IC) Engines we had an introduction about the combustion phenomena taking place in an automotive IC engine. The present article is an effort in continuation to have insights on CFD of combustion in IC engines. As we know the key factors that govern the decision making of any automobile buyer in general are, its mileage, performance, maintenance and tentative life apart from passenger comfort and aesthetics. An engine forms the heart of an automobile that can dictate its performance and life and is solely governed by the combustion pattern inside. The detail analysis of combustion in any engine is one of the most important key factors to confirm its efficient design wherein computational fluid dynamics (CFD) proves to be an efficient tool.